IT as a Service

IT as a Service (ITaaS) covers private clouds hybrid clouds and the cloud management offerings used to create and manage these clouds. This includes coverage of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) private and hybrid cloud offerings, Platform as a Service (PaaS) private and hybrid cloud offerings, and Software as a Service (SaaS). ...

Emerging areas like Desktop as a Service (DaaS), Storage as a Service, and Applications as a Service are also covered. The key issues covered include which enterprise applications and use cases are appropriate for private and hybrid clouds, and how vendors should select the cloud management offerings that are going to be used to manage these various types of cloud services. Covered vendors include VMware (vCloud Automation Center), VirtuStream, CloudBolt Software, Intigua, ElasticBox, ServiceMesh, Cloudsidekick, and Puppet Labs.

Featured Solutions

VMware deserves an enormous amount of credit for promising to reinvent IT Operations around automation and the guaranteed performance of applications. VMware either has or is working on all of the building blocks required to execute upon this vision for the vSphere platform. The combination of innovation by VMware, and by the third party ecosystem on this front will create a new compelling benefit to virtualization, that will allow virtualization to comfortably address business critical and performance critical applications.

Virtual Thoughts

Virtualization & Cloud Security Podcast

Help Share These Videos

Virtual Computer have redefined virtual desktops delivery with their latest release, NxTop 4. In NxTop4 Virtual Computer have aimed to further improve their client-side hypervisor desktop management solution and to better harness the power of end-point PCs for local execution rather than requiring major investments in virtual machine server farms.

Quest (vFoglight 6.6), vKernel (vOPS 4), VMTurbo, Reflex Systems, Xangati, and Cirba (Data Center Control 7.0) have all made significant product enhancements which are being demonstrated at VMworld this week. These announcements largely reflect the increasing level of sophistication in these tools, and the emergence of Hyper-V as the hypervisor upon which cross-platform management strategies are initiated.

Choosing a Private Cloud platform involves trading off the scale of the environment, the types of applications running on the environment and compatibility with public cloud platforms with each other. VMware, DynamicOps, Gale Technologies, Abiquo, Platform Computing and Cisco offer the most compelling enterprise focused production application platforms. However other use cases and markets are best handled by other vendors.

So you are a loyal VMware customer. You have licenses for vSphere 4 and you are about 40% virtualized. Based upon the revised vRAM entitlements in the revised vSphere 5 licensing, you think you are going to be OK as you progress through the more demanding business critical purchased and custom developed applications that lie in front of you. But you would like a hedge and a simple way to manage the second hypervisor that is a part of that hedge. Help has arrived.

Over the last few months we have identified a trend towards “diversity” in the PaaS provider marketplace. Platform as a Service has become Platforms as a Service, the providers are offering multiple choices at each layer of the platform infrastructure, and seeing their role as automating the provisioning of properly-configured instances as required at each layer of the stack.

On Aug 2nd, there was another entrant to this “diverse” PaaS provider marketplace called Cumulogic, a startup with a PaaS cloud positioned alongside Red Hat OpenShift and VMware CloudFoundry that we identified earlier.

VMware has made significant changes to the recently announced vRAM based pricing. The single most significant change is that potential barriers to the virtualization of memory intensive business critical applications have been eliminated by ensuring that no application no matter how big can cause a charge of more than 96GB to be levied against the pool of available vRAM.

Ovum’s research found that desktop virtualization currently represents approximately 15% of the business PC market. However, this figure is dominated by the Presentation Virtualization model (12%), typically used in call datacenter-type environments, and has been for the last 10 years. If PV/terminal services are excluded, the next generation of solutions aimed at CIOs, from the likes of Citrix, Quest and VMware, hold less then 3% of the market, showing that many CIOs are holding back from taking the plunge.